Karl Marx on the “Jewish Question”

Karl Marx saw the reign of money and materialism in modern capitalistic society as the ultimate triumph of Judaism. For “what is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

“The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. […] The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails. […] The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”[1]

Marx understood Jewishness as a mindset, and thought that material greed became the driving force of bourgeois society because it had always been the real basis of Judaism, its inner force, its bloodstream. He wrote this in 1843, at the age of 25. He had already formulated some of his most fundamental ideas, such as this one, in the same article: “Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” To dismiss this article as the work of an immature Marx influenced by the anti-Semite prejudices of his days would be all the more absurd that Marx was born and raised in a Jewish family (his father, Herschel Levi, had changed his name and had his whole family baptized when Karl was six years). Rather we may consider Marx’s thought on the “Jewish question” as one of the seminal insights of his understanding of man’s alienation.

Already convinced that religion is a superstructure shaped by the relations of production, Marx also wrote in the same paper: “Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.” We will agree with Marx if we understand the Jew’s “religion” to mean the dominant Reformed Judaism of nineteenth-century Western Europe. For that form of Judaism was the recent outcome of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, whose stated purpose was to transform Jewishness from an inassimilable national identity into an assimilable religious identity, at least in the eyes of Gentiles—“Be a Jew at home and a man in the street” was the Haskalah motto.

But then, where shall we find the secret of the “real Jew”? How did Jews become materialistic? Shall we agree with Abraham Leon, who builds up on Marx in The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1946), to argue that “the Jews constitute historically a social group with a specific economic function,” an economic function including usury, which has shaped their mentality. “They are a class, or more precisely, a people-class.”[2] The problem with that theory is that it explains Jewishness as formed much later than the Hebrew Bible and independently from it. Here I must disagree with Marx and Leon, and agree with most Jewish thinkers, both religious and secular, that the Bible is the pattern of Jewishness.

We can attempt to reconcile that view with the Marxist one, if we search for the root of Jewish materialism in the ancient history of the Hebrews as told in Exodus, when Moses first encountered Yahweh on the “holy ground” of Mount Horeb or Sinai, while looking after the flocks of his father-in-law, the Midianite priest Jethro (Exodus 2-3), who later instructed him how to rule over the Hebrews (18:19-25)? A number of scholars, starting with Charles Beke (Mount Sinai a Volcano, 1873, and Sinai in Arabia and of Midian, 1878), have stressed that if we take this story seriously, Moses inherited his father-in-law’s religion, whose god seemed inseparable from a sacred mountain which “shakes violently”, sends “peals of thunder and flashes of lightning” and “smokes like a furnace” (19:16-19), and which is clearly located in the volcanic region of north-west Arabia called Midian (as even saint Paul knew: “Sinai is a mountain in Arabia, ”Galatians 4:25). If we follow this theory, which has recently gained ground,[3] Yahwism was originally the religion of a confederation of semi-nomadic proto-Arab tribes living in the semi-desert Hejaz, who set out to conquer lower Syria, a prosperous and urbanized region of the Fertile Crescent where they had already been trading and raiding for centuries. The major innovation made by Moses to the Midianite cult was to provide Yahweh with a means of leaving his volcano: a luxurious gold-plated tent, the detailed specifications of which are given in Exodus, chapters 25 to 31. No wonder that, from that time on, Yahweh appears as the warlord of a people set out for plunder: “All the silver and all the gold, everything made of bronze or iron, will be consecrated to Yahweh and put in his treasury” (Joshua 6:19).

This historical perspective goes a long way to explaining the essence of Judaism, but only if we add that it is not the events themselves that shaped Jewishness, but their crystallization into Holy Scripture; not the Jews’ real history, but the Jews’ story about their past. What is important is not what happened (or not) in Moses and Joshua’s time, but the sacred value attached by Jews to their legend. Identity is memory, not history, and the biblical narrative is the cornerstone of Jewish identity. It is the ultimate and vivid source of Jewishness, its unchangeable genetic code, which has shaped the Jews’ relationship to the world for 2,500 years. In this article, I follow on Marx’s insight and ask: To what extent is material greed the underlying ideology of the Hebrew Bible? This, of course, will lead to a circular reversal of Marx’s assumption that Jewish religion is a product of the Jews’ practical materialism. Rather, I will argue that accumulating the wealth produced by others is the very function assigned to the Jews by their Bible. It is Yahweh, they learn, who ordered Moses to lead the Hebrews to the Canaanite land “flowing with milk and honey” (Numbers 13:27), then told them: “You will suck the milk of nations” (Isaiah 60:16).

“Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares”

Yahweh’s Temple seems to have been primarily intended as the gigantic vault for the precious metals looted from Gentile peoples:

“I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares.” (Haggai 2:7–8)

The Jerusalem Temple was simultaneously a place of worship and a central bank, perhaps the very first of history. Jewish communities dispersed around the world sent their annual contributions there. It is the subject of Cicero’s court speech Pro Flacco: his client, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, governor of Asia, had prevented the Jewish communities under his jurisdiction from sending their annual contributions to Jerusalem. These contributions had been seized in several cities, to the satisfaction of non-Jewish residents. Cicero defended Flaccus’s measure as economically wise. The riches stored in the Temple, the virtual property of the hereditary priestly cast, have given rise to the legend of Salomon’s fabulous treasure. According to 1Kings 10:14, “The weight of gold received annually by Solomon amounted to six hundred and sixty-six talents of gold,” one talent weighing approximately 30 kg.[4]

It is enlightening to compare Yahweh’s greed for gold with Christ’s teaching:

“But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven, where neither moth nor woodworm destroys them and thieves cannot break in and steal. For wherever your treasure is, there will your heart be too” (Matthew 6:20–21).

When Jesus overthrew the stalls of the money-changers and merchants of the Temple, he was challenging Judean institutional religion, and it is unfair to accuse the priests who had him arrested and crucified of having betrayed Yahweh.

While we’re at it, in order to get a new picture of Yahweh, let’s compare the terms of the covenant he offered to the Jewish people, “If you faithfully obey the voice of Yahweh your God […], Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world” (Deuteronomy 28:1), with the terms of that other covenant offered to Jesus, when “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage’” (Matthew 4:8-10).

From the Bible Jews have learned and will continue to learn that their God-given destiny is to “feed on the wealth of the nations (or Gentiles)” (Isaiah 61:5), and also that banking is the way to do it:

“If Yahweh your God blesses you as he has promised, you will be creditors to many nations but debtors to none; you will rule over many nations, and be ruled by none” (Deuteronomy 15:6).

Joseph, son of Jacob, was the first to put this blessing into practice. Having risen from the status of a slave to that of chancellor of Pharaoh, he favors his kinsmen and obtains for them “land holdings in Egypt, in the best part of the country, the region of Rameses.” Responsible for managing the national grain reserves, he stores large amounts during the years of plenty; and then, when famine strikes, he negotiates a high price for the monopolized grain and thus “accumulated all the money to be found in Egypt and Canaan.” The following year, having created a monetary shortage, he forces the peasants to relinquish their herds in exchange for grain: “Hand over your livestock and I shall issue you food in exchange for your livestock, if your money has come to an end.” One year later, the peasants have nothing left “except our bodies and our land,” and so have to beg, then sell themselves in order to survive: “Take us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will become Pharaoh’s serfs; only give us seed, so that we can survive and not die and the land not revert to desert!” And so the Hebrews, after settling in Egypt, “acquired property there; they were fruitful and grew very numerous” (Genesis 47:11-27), which is the sure sign of God’s blessing, according to the Torah. A people endowed with such a holy book has a huge advantage in the competition for the control of wealth—the same advantage as the psychopath uninhibited by any sense of justice.

“For dust you are and to dust you shall return”

Yahweh has no reward stored up in Heaven for anyone. His blessings to those who “fear” him are purely earthly: to be “full of days,” to have numerous offspring and a great fortune. Man’s only survival is through generation and wealth, according to the Torah—blood and money are strangely homonymic in Hebrew, as Jacques Attali has signaled.[5] The archetypal illustration of this is the story of Job. He expects no consolation after death for his suffering in this world: “If man once dead could live again, I would wait in hope, every day of my suffering, for my relief to come” (Job 14:14).[6] Alas! “A human being, once laid to rest, will never rise again, the heavens will wear out before he wakes up, or before he is roused from his sleep” (14:7–12). As the only reward for his fidelity to Yahweh, Job gets a 140-year extension on earth, numerous offspring, “fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-donkeys” (42:12).

Another telling example is found in Isaiah 38: When King Hezekiah “fell ill and was at the point of death,” he expresses no hope of meeting Yahweh in some Otherworld, but instead despairs at the prospect of not seeing him in his Temple anymore. In response to his prayer, Yahweh grants him an extra fifteen years of earthly life. The Song of Hezekiah that follows clearly states that death holds no promise of any life: “those who go down to the pit can hope no longer in your constancy” (Isaiah 38:11-19). Yahweh has nothing to do with the dead, whom he “remembers no more” (Psalms 88:6).

Yahweh does not reside in any kind of Other World, where the righteous could hope to meet him after death. The Hebrew Bible differs from all religious traditions of Antiquity by the inability of its authors to conceive of an afterlife other than as a dreamless sleep in the humid darkness of Sheol, where the good and the bad descend indifferently. Death in Sheol is virtual annihilation, the closest thing imaginable to nothingness.

Judaic tradition knows nothing of the funerary myths so popular in other cultures, whose heroes explore or conquer the Other World. Polytheistic peoples placed their fundamental hopes in an otherworldly Paradise, often endowed with a miraculous spring or a “tree of life,” that provides eternal life and youth. It is the “world where there is no death.” No such hope is given by Yahweh to his people. The Promised Land of the Hebrews is an accessible geographical place situated between the Nile and the Euphrates; it is a destiny that is exclusively terrestrial and collective. Yahwism has focused all his people’s hope on this earth. In fact, the Yahwist scribes have turned the universal myth of the blessed afterlife on its head; the Persian Pardès (Garden) with its tree of eternal life is not, in Genesis, a future promised to the righteous after death, but a past lost forever for all mankind. And there they have staged the drama introducing into the world the double scourge of death and labor; for death in their eyes bears no promise, and work no spiritual reward.

At the core of this biblical materialism is the notion that man is entirely earthly: dust he is and dust he shall return (Genesis 3:19). Some will object that the Torah has two terms to designate the immortal spirit: nephesh and ruah. But nephesh, misleadingly translated in the Greek Septuagint Bible as psyche, designates a “living being,” and sometimes translates simply as “life.” It applies to animals as well as to men, and it is intimately related to blood in the food prohibitions of Leviticus 17. The Hebrew word ruah, translated as pneuma in the Septuagint, means “breath,” “respiration,” and thus also designates life, for animals and humans alike. Thus there is no notion of immortal soul in the formula of Genesis 2:7: “Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life [ruah] into his nostrils, and man became a living being [nephesh].”

In my book From Yahweh to Zionism, I have emphasized the antinomy between the Egyptian religion entirely focused on the Other World, and the Jewish religion aimed at this world only, which led Egyptians to regard it as an anti-religion.[7] This is something that all biblical scholars have recognized since the 19th century. Sigmund Freud drew from the science of his day when he wrote in his Moses and Monotheism (1939):

“No other people of antiquity [than the Egyptians] has done so much to deny death, has made such careful provision for an after-life […]. The early Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was never mentioned in any place.”[8]

Quite correctly, Freud restricts his statement to “early Jewish religion”, often referred to as “ancient Hebraism”, but which I call Yahwism. The evolution of Judaism during the last two thousand years is another story. In the Hellenistic period, Greek and Egyptian dualism infiltrated Jewish thought. But significantly, the Jewish Hellenistic books (written in Greek) that have made it into the Christian Old Testament have been excluded from the Hebrew canon.[9] And their only legacy within Judaism is the idea of physical resurrection, which results from a materialistic twist applied to the Greek concept of anastasis, “awakening”, originally a simple metaphor of the afterlife based on the euphemism of death as sleep.[10]

More recently, Reformed Judaism has also tried to inject the immortal soul into Judaic dogma. But, as I said before, it is the end product of West European Jews’ effort to assimilate. It was deeply mimetic of Christianity in its effort make Jewishness a strict matter of religion rather than of nationhood. And it is highly significant that, when Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the eighteenth-century Haskalah, decided to convince his fellow Jews to accept the creed of the immortality of the soul—a necessary condition for the elevation of humanity according to him—he did not rely on the Jewish tradition. Instead he produced a dialogue in the style of Plato, titled Phaedo or the Immortality of the Soul (1767). This exempted him from admitting that he was borrowing the notion to Christianity—which anyway inherited it from Greek philosophy.

Many Jewish intellectuals actually protested against the introduction of that foreign body into Jewish thought, and their reaction would become a central tenet of Zionism. According to Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, 1862), “Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Judaism than the idea of the salvation of the individual which, according to the modern conception, is the corner-stone of religion.” The essence of Judaism is “the vivid belief in the continuity of the spirit in human history.”[11]

“My covenant must be marked in your flesh”

I believe that materialism is the most fundamental premise of Hebraism, and, by consequence, the bedrock of Jewish culture and its influence on Western society. Even Jewish tribalism is but a corollary of materialism, in as far as as it reduces the individual to his genetic heritage. Yahweh’s obsession is to keep his chosen people’s blood pure, and this in turn is linked to exclusive monotheism: Yahweh forbids Jews to marry their children to non-Jews because “your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:3). But the real causal connection is arguably the opposite: the exclusivity of cult can be seen as a religious justification for endogamy. This is the viewpoint of social psychologist Kevin MacDonald, who in A People That Shall Dwell Alone, argues that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy among peoples.”[12] This is also the viewpoint of some Jewish secular thinkers, such as Isaac Kadmi-Cohen, who claims in an Essay on the Jewish Soul (1929) that, “divinity in Judaism is contained in the exaltation of the entity represented by the race.”[13] The historical fact that Jews are genetically mixed is irrelevant, here: what is important is the cognitive fact that many if not most of them believe they are the descendants of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham.

Circumcision reinforces the primacy of the physical. As “the sign of the covenant” between Yahweh and Abraham, “marked in the flesh” of every male eight days after birth, “generation after generation” (Genesis 17:9–14), it perfectly symbolizes the unspiritual nature of Yahwism. It is like an artificial genetic trait, or a transhumanist mark, but by substraction. Spinoza was on the mark when he wrote: “I attribute such value to the sign of circumcision, that it is the only thing that I esteem capable of assuring an eternal existence to this nation.”

It could be argued that circumcision softens the strict endogamy of Judaism, since it can be a rite of admission into the Jewish community. True, but that never happens in the Bible. Let me briefly recall the edifying story of Shechem, a Canaanite prince who fell in love with Jacob’s daughter and asked to marry her. He was ready to give Jacob’s clan anything, “whatever you ask. Demand as high a bride-price from me as you please.” His father Hamor pleaded for him:

“My son Shechem’s heart is set on your daughter. Please allow her to marry him. Intermarry with us; give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. We can live together, and the country will be open to you, for you to live in, and move about in, and acquire holdings.”

Jacob’s sons then “gave Shechem and his father Hamor a crafty answer,” demanding that “you become like us by circumcising all your males. Then we will give you our daughters, taking yours for ourselves; and we will stay with you to make one nation.” Hamor, trusting the good intentions of Jacob’s tribe, convinced his male subjects to be circumcised. Three days after the operation, “when the men were still in pain,” Jacob’s sons attacked them and “slaughtered all the males,” then “pillaged the town.”

They seized their flocks, cattle, donkeys, everything else in the town and in the countryside, and all their possessions. They took all their children and wives captive and looted everything to be found in the houses.” (Genesis 34:1–29)

So much for Jewish proselytism in the Bible!

One cannot fail to see a link between the metaphysical materialism of the Hebrew Bible (denial of a specifically human soul) and its total contempt for the lives of non-Jews, often undistinguishable from their livestock. In distant ennemy cities, Yahweh instructs his people,

“you will put the whole male population to the sword. But the women, children, livestock and whatever the town contains by way of spoil, you may take for yourselves as booty. You will feed on the spoils of the enemies whom Yahweh your God has handed over to you.”

But in the nearby towns, “you must not spare the life of any living (breathing) thing” (Deuteronomy 20:13-16). So, in Jericho, “They enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). So with the Amalekites: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1Samuel 15:3). From the Midianites, however, Moses allowed the Hebrews to spare “young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves.” At the end of the day, the spoils “came to six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep and goats, seventy-two thousand head of cattle, sixty-one thousand donkeys, and in persons, women who had never slept with a man, thirty-two thousand in all,” not to mention “gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin and lead” (Numbers 31:3–31). It is my hypothesis that such assimilation of non-Jews to animals and booty is directly linked to the denial of their spiritual nature. Isaac Kadmi-Cohen points out that, “in ancient Hebrew, the verb ‘to die’ applies to all living things, human or beast. For Hebrews, one uses the euphemism ‘rejoin one’s people’ (Héasef léamo).”[14]

“I instituted an eternal people”

In the Hebrew Bible, the immortality that is denied the individual is reinvested entirely on the people as a whole: “I instituted an eternal people” Isaiah 44:7. Ultimately, it is as if the Jews were united by a collective, ethnic, genetic soul. Maurice Samuel writes in You Gentiles (1924): “The feeling in the Jew, even in the free-thinking Jew like myself, is that to be one with his people is to be thereby admitted to the power of enjoying the infinite.’”[15] In the same vein, Zionist activist Alfred Nossig wrote in Berlin in 1922: “The Jewish community is more than a people in the modern political sense of the word. […] It forms an unconscious nucleus of our being, the common substance of our soul”[16] Thus it is said that a Jew’s soul is the Jewish people. Or should this collective soul be named Yahweh?

The point that Judaism is a kind of tribal soul has been made by by several Jewish thinkers. The American rabbi Harry Waton, writing in his A Program for Jews and Humanity in 1939, is a good example. Drawing from his understanding of the Bible as speaking only of “an immortality right here on earth,” and from his understanding of Judaism as concerned only “about this earth,” he concludes:

“The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people. Each Jew continues to live in the Jewish people, and he will continue to live so long as the Jewish people will live.”[17]

That is the logic behind such warnings as issued by Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli Prime Minister, against marrying non-Jews:

“Only by intermarriage can a person uproot himself from a nation, and then only in so far as his descendants are concerned. […] Quitting a nation is, therefore, even from a biological point of view, an act of suicide.”[18]

What appears to be missing in Yahwism from the point of view of any other religion is at the same time its greatest strength. For an individual has only a few decades to accomplish his destiny, while a whole people has centuries. The national orientation of the Jewish soul injects into any collective project a spiritual force and endurance with which no other national community can compete. It explains the extraordinary capacity of Jews to advance long-term objectives through transgenerational networks. The Neocons are the most recent and the most formidable of these networks. And nothing is more revealing of their philosophy than the admiration professed by their mentor Leo Strauss to Machiavelli (surely a “secret Jew”, according to Neocon Michael Ledeen, because “if you listen to his political philosophy you will hear Jewish music.”[19]) Strauss believes that the genius of Machiavelli is to have understood that the true patriot is the one who, knowing that he has no individual soul and therefore no risk to be damned, puts no moral limit to what he can do for his country.[20] This is the exact opposite of Christ’s words: “What gain, then, is it for anyone to win the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mark 8:36).

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1843, on www.marxists.org/archive. ↑

According to a more accurate translation than the New Jerusalem Bible, too ambiguous here. ↑

To understand how Egyptians regarded Jewish “religion”, read Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, or, by the same author, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. ↑

For example, the Book of Wisdom (or Wisdom of Solomon), written in Greek in Alexandria in the first century BCE, asserts that “God created human beings to be immortal,” and criticizes those who “do not believe in a reward for blameless souls” (2:22–23). But even within the Greco-Jewish literature of this age, the materialist viewpoint prevails: according to Ecclesiastes (or Book of Ben Sira), also not in the Jewish Tanakh, “the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same: […] everything comes from the dust, everything returns to the dust” (3:19–20). ↑

The verb anistanai appears in chapter 12 of the Book of Daniel (12:2-3), written in Greek, together with the Greco-Egyptian notion of the good dead transformed into bodies of light, but the notion has undergone a materialistic twist in the Books of Maccabees, where anastasis becomes the miraculous resuscitation, at the End of Time, of the dismembered bodies of the martyrs, for which no immortal soul is needed. ↑

Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, University of Chicago Press, 1978. As usual, Strauss here attributes his own deepest thoughts to others, as a cryptic way of addressing only those who are qualified for the truth. ↑

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The Christ does not refer to ‘forfeiting his one’s life’, but to losing the soul.

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. 36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul (τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ)? 37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? 38 Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. ”

Mr. Laurent there is no question that an Israel of God will exist both the New Testament and the Old clearly spells this out. Rev. 20 and Isaiah 60:22 and please do not take scripture out of context ie: “You will suck the milk of nations” (Isaiah 60:16) God’s timetable is not our timetable and where the Jews are concerned patience has long run out. 363 AD as a prime example:

The stones were piled high and ready. Costly wood had been purchased. The necessary metal was at hand. The Jews of Jerusalem were rejoicing. Tomorrow—May 20, 363 A.D.—the rebuilding of the Temple would begin! Suddenly, and without warning, at the third hour of the night… the streets of Jerusalem trembled and buckled, crushing two hundred years of hope in a pile of dust. No longer would there be any possibility of rebuilding the Temple.

What we see occurring is nothing more than man’s attempt at getting back what was taken away and again they will fail. Zechariah (12:10–11, 13:1–6) clearly points this out. The cost unfortunately will be Armageddon as taught in the Book of Revelation and of course by Christ Jesus in Matthew 25.

The bible as glorious a book as it is man has unfortunately chosen to accept only those things which appeal to them. One cannot do this and too many are guilty of this both within Judaism and the Church unfortunately.

I hope this helps.

By the way “Yahweh forbids Jews to marry their children to non-Jews because “your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:3).

and what do you think the New Testament teaches? ie:

It’s interesting that what was once relegated to a nation is now applicable to another Israel: The Church of Christ. The more things change, the more they stay the same:

“Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:”

“I will live with them
and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they will be my people.”

Therefore,

“Come out from them
and be separate,
says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
and I will receive you.”

And,

“I will be a Father to you,
and you will be my sons and daughters,
says the Lord Almighty.” (2 Corinthians 6:14–18)

Thanks for the narrative of the failed Temple rebuild attempt under Emperor Julian the apostate.

Laurent doesn’t bother to explain the context of Deut 7:3 which is clear in the preceding two verses. For even if Judaism has misinterpreted or twisted this instruction to mean that all Gentiles are banned from intermarrying with the chosen people the truth is different. The prohibition is against marrying the Amorite. But the Amorite was given time because Yahweh is most merciful

Gen 15:16 But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.

Amorite is a generic name for the pagan people that inhabited the land of Canaan. Canaan and not Ham was cursed by Noach for uncovering his father’s nakedness.

Laurent Guyénote you stated the Hebrew Bible differs from all religious traditions of Antiquity by the inability of its authors to conceive of an afterlife other than as a dreamless sleep in the humid darkness of Sheol.

However, in my reading of the life of Job it appears he had an assurance that though he was going to be eaten by worms, he was expecting a new body and in that body he would actually see God face to face, obviously conscious. In Job 19:25-27 he says that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”

Then there’s Isaiah 26:19: “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You, who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.”

Here’s Dan 12:1-3, which is quite clear: “At that time Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book— will be delivered. Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.”

From these few examples above I’m curious what was it that lead you to conclude there is no afterlife in the Hebrew Bible?

“1 And the hand of the Lord came upon me, and the Lord brought me forth by the Spirit, and set me in the midst of the plain, and it was full of human bones. 2 And he led me round about them every way: and, behold, [there were] very many on the face of the plain, very dry. 3 And he said to me, Son of man, will these bones live? and I said, O Lord God, thou knowest this. 4 And he said to me, Prophesy upon these bones, and thou shalt say to them, Ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5 Thus saith the Lord to these bones; Behold, I [will] bring upon you the breath of life: 6 and I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and will spread skin upon you, and will put my Spirit into you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. 7 So I prophesied as [the Lord] commanded me: and it came to pass while I was prophesying, that, behold, [there was] a shaking, and the bones approached each one to his joint. 8 And I looked, and behold, sinews and flesh grew upon them, and skin came upon them above: but there was not breath in them. 9 And he said to me, Prophesy to the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord; Come from the four winds, and breathe upon these dead [men], and let them live. 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath entered into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, a very great congregation. 11 And the Lord spoke to me, saying, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: and they say, Our bones are become dry, our hope has perished, we are quite spent. 12 therefore prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord; Behold, I [will] open your tombs, and will bring you up out of your tombs, and will bring you into the land of Israel. 13 And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, that I may bring up my people from [their] graves. 14 And I will put my Spirit within you, and ye shall live, and I will place you upon your own land: and ye shall know that I [am] the Lord; I have spoken, and will do [it], saith the Lord.when I have opened your graves, that I may bring up my people from [their] graves. 14 And I will put my Spirit within you, and ye shall live, and I will place you upon your own land: and ye shall know that I [am] the Lord; I have spoken, and will do [it], saith the Lord. 15 And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 16 Son of man, take for thyself a rod, and write upon it, Juda, and the children of Israel his adherents; and thou shalt take for thyself another rod, and thou shalt inscribe it for Joseph, the rod of Ephraim, and all the children of Israel that belong to him…”

And Psalm 67:1-3, recited on the Sunday of the Resurrection:
“Let God arise (ΑΝΑΣΤΗΤΩ ὁ Θεός), and let his enemies be scattered; and let them that hate him flee from before him. 2 As smoke vanishes, let them vanish: as wax melts before the fire, so let the sinners perish from before God. 3 But let the righteous rejoice; let them exult before God: let them be delighted with joy”.

Yes, the book of Job includes the belief in physical, materialistic, organic resurrection, which is a gross materialist twist on the Greek anastasis. “Resurrection” is mentionned in chapter 12 of the Book of Daniel, written in Greek. The Greek word is anastasis, and its translation as “resurrection” is misleading. Anastasis, like the associated verb anistanai, literally means “awakening” or “rising up”, and stands for the beginning of the afterlife in Egyptian and Greek thought, in keeping with the euphemism of death as sleep (koimao, “to fall asleep”, meaning to die). Nothing more is implied in the famous verse from Daniel:
“Of those who are sleeping in the Land of Dust, many will awaken [anistanai] some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace. Those who are wise will shine as brightly as the expanse of the heavens, and those who have instructed many in uprightness, as bright as stars for all eternity” (Daniel 12:2–3).
The transfiguration of the good dead into “bodies of light” or stars in Heaven is another common religious motif in Greco-Egyptian culture. The Hebrew Bible often says of a Patriarch that he “fell asleep” or “laid down with his ancestors” , but never that he “rose up”. Significantly, the concept of anastasis did take root within post-Hellenistic Judaism, but with an unmistakable materialistic twist, already apparent in the two Books of Maccabees: it is here applied to the horribly tortured bodies of the martyrs, expected to miraculously reconstitute at the coming End of Time. No immortal soul is needed in this process. This evolution, far from contradicting Hebraic materialism, confirms it: it proves that a spiritualist notion like anastasis can only be integrated into the Hebraic tradition after being grossly materialized.
The notion of physical resurrection has been adopted by Christianity, yet it has always been in conflict with the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul, which Jesus clearly held. Many attempts have been made to reconcile the two, but it is impossible. Jesus clearly challenged that physical understanding of the resurreciton (and so will Paul), when he refuted both Pharisees (who believed in physical resurrection in the End of Days) and Sadducees (who believed in nothing), clearly expressing a spiritualist conception of the resurrection conforming to the most common Hellenistic view: “For when they rise from the dead, […] they are like the angels in heaven.” (Mark 12:25)

@”clearly expressing a spiritualist conception of the resurrection conforming to the most common Hellenistic view: “For when they rise from the dead, […] they are like the angels in heaven.” (Mark 12:25)”

…Better quote the whole passage without omissis, and the question of Sadducees:

“At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
“When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”
(Mark 12:23,25)

The context of Jesus Christ’s words now is more clear, I think.

About physical risurrection of body of Jesus Christ (“first of many”) a man named Thomas may says something: Luke 24:36-44 and John 20:26-28.

Mr. Guyenot does not believe in the physical Resurrection of the Jesus Christ, therefore neither in the Church (the good old French anti-clericalism). That’s why his reading of the Scriptures is what it is, unfortunately. But does he believe in Christ?
Did “Jesus clearly challenged that physical understanding of the resurreciton (and so will Paul)”??!!

“21 From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matthew 16:21).

“31 For he taught his disciples, and said unto them, The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that he is killed, he shall rise the third day. 32 But they understood not that saying, and were afraid to ask him” (Mark 9:31-32)

“44 And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. 45 Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, 46 And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” (Luke 24:44-46)

12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: 14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. 15 Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. 16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: 17 And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. 18 Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. 19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. 20 But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. 21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive 23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. 24 Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. 25 For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet 26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” (1 Cor. 15:12-26).

Read his ‘Le roi sans prophète (The King without Prophet)’, a penible regurgitation of all the anti-Christian myths of the ‘historical-critical method’ and you will say like the other commentator down the line: “How very Jewish of you”. And so very French.

@ “a penible regurgitation of all the anti-Christian myths of the ‘historical-critical method”

Personally I am not expert and not even interested to apply wild Statistics to the study of Scriptures, so to vivisect Old and New Testament like an annelid in a physiology lab. Anyway, for those interested a simple intro to this type of (reductionist?) operations is here:

A criterion used by this type of experts is the simplicity. These scholars normally think that the original texts had to be more “sober”: so for example the “many sick persons” of Mark 1:34 have become “all the sick persons” of Matthew 8:16, adding a little bit of exaggeration of course. At those times there were not the magnetic recorders, therefore it is better the first version of Mark because of its “sobriety”. Dura lex sed lex.

Another criterion is the age of the sources. The more the age of a source, the better it is for hermeneutic purposes, to apply for interpretation (exegesis) of Scriptures. The lesser the age of the Gospels, the higher the probability of a late mythicization and/or theologization of simple acts of a community of dreamers. That is why is so difficult to back-dating the Gospels in the MS circles: a example is the case of the fragment 7Q5 (Dead Sea Scrolls), identified as a copy of Mark 6:52-53 surely before 50 AD with strong papyrologic arguments, and the following stoning of J.O’Callaghan (and later C.P.Thiede) by historical-critical biblists. Avoiding any papyrologic argument, ‘bien sure’.

Another criterion is the most difficult variant (lectio difficilior). The more difficult the variants of textual sources are, the better it is. Very few manuscripts say that Jesus Christ “got angry” after the leper’s request, while the great majority say that Jesus Christ “was moved”: but the experts says it is more probable that the first variant was transformed in the second, rather than the opposite, because the first variant is more “difficult”. Hence Jesus Christ was capable to get angry not only with moneylenders, but also with lepers.

Another criterion is the shortest variant (lectio brevior), roughly the same criterion of “amplification” about the plurality of sources (search Bultmann, as I remember, who starts from Heidegger). If two textes are in contrast, it is more probably that the more rich one is an amplification of the shorter one, rather than the opposite. As you can see this is a very slippery argument, because it is not so easy to evaluate links between texts that are by premise “in contrast”. It is capital here the correct dating of manuscripts. Unsurprisingly, historical-critical biblists don’t like papyrologysts, because recently they have apported the most interesting arguments to begin a serious review of the Biblical MS Narrative of XIX and XX.

Laurent, SINCE YOU QUOTED: “Of those who are sleeping in the Land of Dust, many will awaken [anistanai] some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace…”,
WHAT IS your opinion on two timely divided resurrections in The Revelation: 1st righteous, and after 1000 years everybody else? I said The Antichrist Wrote The Revelation to deceive pseudo-christian sects.

Well, here is what I wrote on the apocalyptic tradiiton and the Book Revelation in my book From Yahweh to ZIon:
It was mainly Matthew, followed by Luke, who reintroduced the apocalyptic into the message of Jesus. (It is also in Matthew alone that Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” 15:24). Mark’s only apocalyptic passage in chapter 13 is a condensation of apocalyptic imagery from the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, henceforth repeated in many Christian writings. This is the only time that Jesus uses such apocalyptic imagery, and the length of this logion contrasts with the usual brevity of the words of Jesus in Mark; the passage is therefore unanimously considered a late addition.
The most important apocalyptic text of the Christian tradition, known as the book of Revelation, is not only foreign to the message of the earthly Jesus, but is today regarded as of non-Christian origin, for its central part (from 4:1 to 22:15) refers neither to Jesus nor to any Christian theme evidenced elsewhere. Only the prologue (including the letters to the seven churches in Asia) and the epilogue are ostensibly Christian, and they are attached to the body of the text by easily identifiable editorial transitions (not to mention the double signature of “John” in 22:8 and “Jesus” in 22:16). The book of Revelation takes up in part the animal symbolism of Daniel (the two monstrous beasts and the dragon of chapter 13, followed by the lamb of chapter 14) and displays a ferocious hatred of Rome, as well as of those who sympathize with Hellenism: “To anyone who proves victorious, and keeps working for me until the end, I will give the authority over the nations which I myself have been given by my Father, to rule them with an iron scepter and shatter them like so many pots” (2:26–27).
We may therefore look at the apocalyptic current as the result of a re-Judaization of the Gospel message, under the influence of a turn of mind foreign to Jesus. This is a relevant observation for our time, for we shall see that apocalypticism has distorted so-called “evangelical” Christianity to the point of transforming it into an objective ally of American-Zionist militarism.

Yes, chazon shel Yochanan aka apocalypse of the apostle John appears to be written in segments. But this is not because the Christian parts are later additions as you have asserted but because the entire scroll or book has a chiastic architecture. This is very common in Semitic writing style to emphasize the main message. This message is that the Lamb of God is triumphal. What can be more Messianic ( Christian for you) than that? Yes, Yeshua was sent out to the lost sheep of Israel ( Note that the New Covenant both in Jer 31:31-34 and in Hebrews is with the houses of Yehuda and Israel and not with any church) but He came to His own and His own received Him not so He gave power to anyone receiving Him to become Bene ha’Elohim aka sons of God. This is even more clearly demonstrated by the Great Multitude harvest of souls from every nation, race, language and tribe in Rev 7. What can be more Messianic ( Christian for you) than that?

The Olivet Discourse is rather an anti-apocalyptic discourse.
“Take heed that no man deceive you. 5 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. 6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet”
“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only”, but it will sudden “as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be”.

Apocalypse means “uncovering” that is revealing. So how can the Olivet discourse be called anti-apocalyptic? He is revealing to them what will happen in the end times. So He is unveiling, uncovering, revealing. That is the essence of the scroll of revelation. That is the purpose of the scroll with the seven seals being revealed by the Lamb.

‘Apocalyptic’ is an adjective that has been used to describe both a certain type of literature and a special feature of religions in late antiquity. Confusion sometimes arises because it is employed frequently in contradictory ways. Either a revelatory literature (and in that sense all the dicta and actions of Jesus are a ‘revelation’), or a religious bearing that is preoccupied by the approach of the end of all normal time and history, and in that sense the Olivet Discourse is not. The Christ announced the destruction of the Temple: “And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down”. The disciples ask: “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”.
It is clear that the Christ answers these three questions. The disciples were still immersed in the surrounding messianic atmosphere, waiting for the Christ to ‘restore again the kingdom to Israel? 7 And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.’ But it is not clear that the end of the world would follow the destruction of the Temple, if neither ‘man, nor the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only’ know when the hour would come.
What the Jesus repeatedly said and warned is that He is not the Messiah that the Jews were waiting to restore the ‘kingdom of Israel’. Jesus was not the ‘failed’ Zionist King, that the Zionists present. He was accused of threatening to destroy the Temple, not of rebuilding it.

REV. 6.13 to 16 and the stars of the sky fell to earth, … And the sky was split apart … and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And emperors … and every slave and every free hid themselves in caves and rocks of the mountains; and they said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the one who is sitting on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.
VS.
LUKE 23.28 to 31 Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children their own. * … Then they will begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us! Because when you make this with raw wood, what will be dry?

LUKE 21.20 to 23 … * {TWICE THE Romans razed Jerusalem and the temple, 70 and 135, when BARKOHBA lifted uproar against the Romans releasing HE is the Messiah, and they, in answer toppled JERUSALEM, KILLED 580,000 people, and the place where the temple was plowed; then the temple was rebulid in the Roman-Greek style, and Judah EMERGING banned on pain of death.}

LUKE 21.24 … and Jerusalem shall be trodden down the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are not met. {637th conquered by the Arabs (Muslims)}

THEREFORE, IF ANY recap in chronological context, WE HAVE THE LORD`s IN DETAIL WARNING ON DEMOLITION OF THE CITY AND THE TEMPLE (stone upon stone WONT be left, he said), Unfortunately, even TEARS FOR TWO GENERATIONS, for he said, you and your children, a false Messiah COMPARISON WITH DRY WOOD ETC.

Fair, but insufficient considering mentioned militarism almost drove us into 3rd w.w. And it will, one of these days. Why don’t you consider what I wrote and quoted so many verses: The Antichrist wrote the Revelation?

Because it is a fantasy of your own. If you are really Serbian, you’ll be better off following (and adhering to) the teachings of the Orthodox Church which is inspired by the Holy Ghost (of which the Serbian Church is a member) who ‘will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have told you’, as promised by the Christ and not whatever blogs take your fancy.

You are correct! The Talmud, and the Koran) are full of satanic verses. The culture of impunity for atrocities in the name of their demon god comes from them not from the Tanak (aka Old Testament).

To speak of the Old Testament’s influence on Zionists is bizarre as Herzl father of Zionism was a self confessed atheist who even sought support from the Vatican or the devil as he didn’t believe in God.

If you refer to the Canaanites tribes generically known as the Amorite but including many others listed in Gen 15:18-21 then you are barking at the wrong tree because I have already wrote about them as being wicked an deserving of extermination per God’s own judgment. But first let’s understand that Israel did not exterminate then as commanded by the covenant and worse they misapplied even to this day the ban to all Gentiles when it was restricted to the Canaanite tribes. So go back and please re read that the culture of impunity is due to the Talmud satanic verses and not to the Tanak’s divinely inspired instructions.

@”It is enlightening to compare Yahweh’s greed for gold with Christ’s teaching”

In the Old Testament Yahwe is not a greed blind God: the author forgets the Prophets and the Psalms, expressly cited by Jesus Christ. Two between many:

Ezekiel 8:5-17

Then he said to me, “Son of man, look toward the north.” So I looked, and in the entrance north of the gate of the altar I saw this idol of jealousy. And he said to me, “Son of man, do you see what they are doing—the utterly detestable things the Israelites are doing here, things that will drive me far from my sanctuary? But you will see things that are even more detestable.” Then he brought me to the entrance to the court. I looked, and I saw a hole in the wall. He said to me, “Son of man, now dig into the wall.” So I dug into the wall and saw a doorway there. And he said to me, “Go in and see the wicked and detestable things they are doing here.” So I went in and looked, and I saw portrayed all over the walls all kinds of crawling things and unclean animals and all the idols of Israel. In front of them stood seventy elders of Israel, and Jaazaniah son of Shaphan was standing among them. Each had a censer in his hand, and a fragrant cloud of incense was rising. He said to me, “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of Israel are doing in the darkness, each at the shrine of his own idol? They say, ‘The LORD does not see us; the LORD has forsaken the land.’ ” Again, he said, “You will see them doing things that are even more detestable.” Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the LORD, and I saw women sitting there, mourning the god Tammuz. He said to me, “Do you see this, son of man? You will see things that are even more detestable than this.” He then brought me into the inner court of the house of the LORD, and there at the entrance to the temple, between the portico and the altar, were about twenty-five men. With their backs toward the temple of the LORD and their faces toward the east, they were bowing down to the sun in the east. He said to me, “Have you seen this, son of man? Is it a trivial matter for the people of Judah to do the detestable things they are doing here? Must they also fill the land with violence and continually arouse my anger? Look at them putting the branch to their nose!

Epistle to Romans 11:1-8 (The Remnant of Israel)

I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel: “Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me”? And what was God’s answer to him? “I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. What then? What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened, as it is written:
“God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear, to this very day.”

Thank you…..Thank you so much for this truly revealing article. For many years I have wondered why the jews are hated around the world. As a child I recall asking this of my teachers. I never revived a satisfactory response.
This article has has opened my eyes. I will endeavour to read as many of the books and papers cited.

You’re welcome. The Old Testament is the Troyan Horse of Yahweh into christianity. And, as you see in the comments, not everybody is ready to be plugged out of the biblical matrix.
Read my previous articles on this website:https://thesaker.is/tag/laurent-guyenot/
And I’ll have more coming.
Best

The premise that Yahweh is a cruel semi god contrasted to Jesus is a heresy from the early church propagated by Marcion.

But the author is right in denouncing the misinterpretation by Judaism of the Exodus account.

I could debunk it here:

In response to chabad re interpretation of the exodus and the omer count

Except that the Torah doesn’t say that the Jews left Egypt. [Paul says the opposite in Galatians, that Jerusalem is still in bondage with her children].

It doesn’t say that G-d rescued the You-wish nation. It says that a mixed multitude including the children of the Syrian Yacov (Deut 26:5) were rescued.

The Torah doesn’t say that each day “we” the You-wish took one step closer to becoming G-d’s chosen nation.

The Torah says that right after Shavuot when the Book of the Covenant was ratified at the Mount the people went a whoring with the golden calf worship.

Due to transgression, says Paul, the law [of Sacrifice] (Levitical priesthood Covenant) was imposed. But soon after, the ten spies gave an evil report resulting in the refusal of God in allowing the first generation into the land.

Furthermore, the Torah predicts the ultimate prevarication [after the Book of the Law is given by Moshe to be ratified by Yehoshua at Mt Eval]. This is in Deut 31:16-18 which is further expanded in Zechariah 11:10-14 and masterfully pieced together by Paul in 1 Cor 11:23-25 as the trigger of the New Covenant. This New (Not Renewed as this clashes against putting new wine in old wine skins) Covenant is ratified at the Last Supper Pesach Seder by The Word of the Lord with the “poor of the flock” as per Zech 11:11

When are we going to start believing the Torah instead of the likes of Chabad charlatans?

Was Abram ever called “the Jew?” Or was Yacov (Jacob) called instead Aramean, Syrian or Assyrian? Hint Deut 26:5

Does having flesh circumcision of one’s foreskin entitle one to eternal salvation ? Does having an infant baptism entitle one to eternal salvation ? No!

Does wearing Kippot has any bearing on Salvation? Nope!

It is all smoke and mirrors

The Bible is Yeshua centric and that is it! The Pharisees are out to lunch even today!

Israel means Prince (Sar) of God (El). The Father is King and Yeshua is His Prince. Read Isaiah 49 to understand who God’s servant named Israel is.

The Semitic root word “Sar” is transliterated into many languages. For example: from it we get the derived Words: Cesar (Latin), Kaiser (German) and Czar (Russian) indicating the Ruler in charge.

Like Yacov THE SYRIAN ( read Deut 26:5) we are grafted into Yeshua and thus become Israel because Yeshua is Israel the Prince of God ( see Isaiah 49). [Note that Masoretic translations to English have commentary that the name Israel is not to be taken as the personal name of the suffering servant ( Messiah) but that you must believe that the suffering servant is “the collective of the Jewish people” in spite of “the Jewish people” not being mentioned in this prophecy. In any case this is contradicted by the two oldest sources: the Peshitta Tanach and the Septuagint that are at least 10 centuries older]

This is not of your doing but it is the unmerited promise that we can trust fully 100% because of Yeshua. Anyone not in Yeshua can’t call self “Israel” legitimately.

“Joh 8:33 They answered him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?”

By their own admission the Pharisees declared that they were Edomites the arch enemies of God ( Read Ovadayah). They were seed of Abraham yet never in bondage in Egypt or Babylon.

Because Phariseeism became mainstream post second temple Judaism at Yavne aka Jamnia we know that Esau has seized and hijacked Yacov’s inheritance (Eze 36:5) and rulership. This is implicit in Gen 27 where Esau is granted to temporarily squat under “the dew of heaven” and to feed from the “fatness of the Eretz” which is first promised by Yitzchak to be the gift from God to Yakov. This is also implicit in Esau getting his brother’s yoke off his neck. [Note that the Masoretes inserted the word “far” meaning that Esau will live far from the dew of heaven and from the fatness of the Eretz but maps show Edom to the South of the Judean highlands but within this territory. In any case this is contradicted by the two oldest sources: the Peshitta Tanach and the Septuagint that are at least 10 centuries older]]

Historically, this happened when Herod the Great married Maryamne and became the usurper king of Judeans. This was the unintended consequence after Hasmonean (aka Maccabee) Yochanan Hyrcanus conquered the Edomites and forced them to get circumcised. This was disobedience against the Torah. Moshe had been forbiden to take any land from Esau because The Lord said: I have given Mt Seir to Esau. Deut 2:5

Furthermore, the Romans’ made an administrative decision for Indumea (Edom under Roman occupation of Judea) to become an integral part of Judea and no longer a district adjoined to Judea. Thus, we have the unmasking of fake Judeans in Rev 2:9 & 3:9 as impostors and identity thieves. But some indumeans retained their true identity and followed Yeshua (Mark 3:8)

Candidly, the on line Jewish Enciclopedia recognizes that Edom is no more a stand alone nation after it became fully integrated with Judeans at the time of the Herodian dynasty

Interestingly, Gen 3:15 states that after the seed of the woman crushes the head of the serpent, the serpent and/or its seed will bruise the heel of the seed of the woman. This is a clear reference to Yakov whose name means “heel” in Hebrew. This is expressed elsewhere (Je 30:7-8) as “the trouble of Yakov”.

In conclusion, rabbinical judaism is Edom and thus the enemy of God. Edom is the father of duke Amalek the mortal enemy of Yacov and Judeans. But we won’t uproot the tares from the grain because that isn’t our job but a task for the Set Apart Angels towards the end of this age.

Knowing this, it is just bizarre and incomprehensible to bend over backwards to follow after such people for clues on calendar and extra biblical rituals that come from the blasphemous Talmud.

@Candidly, the on line Jewish Enciclopedia recognizes that Edom is no more a stand alone nation after it became fully integrated with Judeans at the time of the Herodian dynasty

It had to, it is a historical information transmitted by Flavius Josephus in “Antiquities of the Jews” (Greek: Ἰουδαϊκὴ ἀρχαιολογία, Ioudaikē archaiologia; Latin: Antiquitates Judaicae),13, 9,1. It was never a secret.

We know that ‘Israel’ was the name given to Jacob following the episode of his wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22–32), hence the name of his descendance “House of Israel’, the 12 tribes, of which Judah is one.

I wish to thank all who have replied on this topic. Sun Tzu I appreciate your insight as well as Laurent Guyénot. Much to think about.

I was a christian (somewhat gnostic). But gave it up long ago. While there maybe chosen people. For me it is only an excuse to behave poorly.

A quick question. My understanding is that Abraham purchased a plot of land to bury Sarah from the local people. As far as I know he pastured his sheep with permission. If that is correct. The only ethic part of the promise land that can be construed legitimately as say “Hebrew” would be this peace. The rest appears to be stolen.

Why apostates feel compelled to tell loudly to everyone that they are apostates? When one is received into a sect the first thing for him is to declare that he abandoned and denounced his former beliefs. And then he must constantly reassure his new coreligionists that his conversion is ‘sincere’. And then start asking curly question to embarrass his former coreligionists.

The people were chosen to be a priestly honourable people, sort of ambassadors of the Most High God, not as an excuse to behave poorly.

Yes, although Abram later known as Abraham was given the land promise by God, he didn’t behave poorly but honourably. He didn’t take matters in his own hand but waited patiently and never received during his life the fulfillment of the promise.

With respect to the land promise in Gen 15:18-21 it is a Suserain Covenant by none other than God Himself.

When the Earth land and geopolitical responsibilities were assigned to powerful angelic beings, God retained the jurisdiction for the entire Fertile Crescent stretching from the Brook of Egypt aka the River of Egypt (this is not the Nile River but a Wadi South of Gaza) to the Euphrates in present day Eastern Syria.

I am quoting from the Brenton translation of the Septuagint as the Masoretic Hebrew bible of the 9th Century is corrupted and manipulated in many key verses by you know whom.

Deu 32:8 When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God.
Deu 32:9 And his people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, Israel was the line of his inheritance.

This land was being occupied by wicked people generically known as the Amorite.

Abram was given this land in promise and held in escrow if you will until such time when the children of Israel came out of Egypt after the Exodus.

This land of Canaan (the name is also of the first born of Ham son of Noach) was going to be conquered by God Himself as a punishment for the Amorites hatred of God, evidenced by their wickedness. The Amorites had to be utterly exterminated from the land. That might sound harsh for a loving God but these people were totally depraved.

Gen 15:16 But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.

and Matthew 13:39-43….in real time offers some real hope
for the people who want to live in truth, in the kingdom
where there are no “TARES” !!!

Revelation 3:9…means no proselytes to Talmudic Judaism
will be included in the word….”THEE”.

JUST CAUSE….truth is hate to those that are employed by
the global Mass murder for filthy lucre
– Money Changers and Pharisees….who Hate Jesus
the Messiah for the children of Israel in Genesis 49
and Deuteronomy 32 & 33.

@Revelation 3:9…means no proselytes to Talmudic Judaism will be included in the word….”THEE”.

When you read from the Peshitto Crawford manuscript the Aramean Word is not Synagogue but כנושתא which is transliterated Knesset. This word implies that it is the Sanhedrin and not any generic Synagogue that is indicted here. Thus I can’t agree that this is focused on the Jewish proselytes but giving a pass to the Edomites represented in the Sanhedrin.

By the way, even the word synagogue (= συναγωγή) is a Greek word meaning a gathering of people, assembly, or a meeting place. Funny that the You-wish would choose a Greek word to name their churches.

The 4th Gospel 3.13 clearly states that no one had ascended into heaven (of heavens, above of the heavens, the heavens over all) except the one who is descended, the Son of man which is in heaven (also in Ephesians 4:10 ), after which it becomes ridiculous to claim that the same Evangelists, the disciple whom Jesus loved (several verses, but at the last one says only student/disciple, where he stands and accent all the time, to distinguish himself from the one who represents himself a prophet John), the student whose testimony we know is true (John 21:24), could write an untruth in the false revelation 4.1 about its own climbing to heaven, and / or ascending two witnesses [REV. 11,12] by an unidentified voice.

Even the Lord speaking in advance of his own ascension, before speaking against SELF ASCENDING – SELFLIFTING, does not claim that he is the holder of action, but says that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so should HE be raised/lifted/ascended (3.14), ie. When YOU pick up the Son of Man (8.28), ie, when it is lifted (12:32) …
Even then it was THE JUDGMENT TO THE prince of this world (who reigns in the wind), who is launched (Rev. 12.31) “on Patmos, WHO has reached THE SKY [REV. 1.9; 4.1], “and IN the Lord HAS/had nothing (John 14,30), because even DID not transmit the message personally, but mediated through angels [REV. 1,1]!

WITH The right hand, then, God ascend the Lord (Acts 2,33).

Sorry for my English, but this should be understandable for those who studied New Testament

Pace your Marx quotations and exegesis; my own painfully developed understanding of world Jewry over the past 10 years, based on its colonization of almost the entirety of Western politics, culture and the institutional structures of Christianity (especially including its historical arch-enemy the Roman Catholic Church) have led me to very similar conclusions. So much so that, whenever I find myself subjected to admonition for arguing against the standard shibboleths of western capitalist/materialist culture, I have taken to using a brief one liner in reply, viz: “How very Jewish of you”.

It’s polemical effect is akin to throwing a spanner into a delicate piece of machinery. It never fails to bewilder because it is usually spot-on accurate and my interlocutor is uncertain whether to take it as a compliment or an insult.

Good read! I must emphatically say I am not a marxist, and basically agree that Marxism hijacked the socialist movement. And, needless to say, I recognize bolchevism as basically a Jewish Russophobic movement. That doesn’t mean Marx didn’t have occasionally some good insights, and that is the case on “the Jewish question,” but also on the alienating power of money. Don’t you think?

Enjoyed the read here is something I posted a few days ago one of the articles of the Saker titled “So it was the ‘invincible Tsahal” about the Jews. It comes to the same conclusion as this article. Obviously I’m not as well spoken as the writer of this article.

Ahmed on April 09, 2018 · at 6:37 pm UTC
Honestly I agree with everything you said. Whatever this “Jew” thing means, many of them have a twisted world view. Now I’m not going to say all Jew’s are bad, or that no good Jew’s exist. However the problem is within their religious beliefs. To believe that you are chosen by God almighty not based on merit, but because of the supposed tribe you were born into, is one of the most heinous ideas that could exist. What kind of belief is this??? And what kind of God, who created all of creation, but He supposedly intends guidance only for a specific tribe???
Now when it comes to the Muslim point of view, we believe, that the promise that God almighty gave was for the prophet Abraham(as) and his descendants. That doesn’t mean only the descendants of Abraham(as) can be guided, but that the righteous amongst them will guide humanity to true monotheism. So that covenant applied to the righteous prophets amongst the children of prophet Abraham, not only the sons of prophet Jacob(who was named Israel), but any of the descendants of prophet Abraham(as). But the Jew’s try to take this covenant and apply it to their entire tribe!!! To us this is an obvious fabrication. That covenant applied to the righteous ones among the descendants of Abraham (as), such as the prophet Ishmael, Issac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Zachariah, john the Baptist, the Messiah Jesus, and prophet Muhammad(pbuta). There’s others but those are some off the top of my head. So the way I see it is this Jewish cult is trying to steal the legacy of the righteous prophets. Their rabbis changed their religion, into what it currently is today.
What they did, would be the same as if all the Arabs after the prophet Muhammad(saw) claimed that they were the chosen people of God!!! Obviously this is false, as history shows us their were many unjust Arabs, who the true Creator would never be pleased with. Many even in our current time. The same thing with this group of Jew’s who claim to be the descendants of the prophet Jacob(as). In their ego trip they claimed something that is a lie against their own souls, and now the world is seeing the fruit of that destructive belief that they deluded themselves into believing.
Sadly because of this egotistical belief, many of them inadvertently worship themselves, or their supposed tribe, instead of God almighty. They will never notice this because they enjoy this high they get from believing that they are “chosen.”

I would also like to post this excerpt from the commentary on the Quran by the late famed scholar from Iran Allamah Muhammad Husayn Taba’tabai. Hes talking about a different topic but refers to the Ancient Hebrew Israelite people of the Levant area. Whether or not you believe the Jews of today are the descendants of the Ancient Israelites is inconsequential, because they mimic them to a tee in their folly. The Allamah wrote this commentary back sometimes in the 1950’s, but it is still used mostly by Shi’i Muslims as the go to commentary on the Quran.

AN ACADEMIC AND ETHICAL DISCOURSE ON UNQUESTIONING ADOPTION OF CONCEPTS AND RULINGS

The nation, most frequently described in the Qur’ãn, is that of the Israelites; and the prophet most numerously referred to therein is their prophet, Mũsã (Moses)(a. s.) , son of ‘Imrãn. His name has been mentioned in one hundred and thirty six places, twice as many as the second most numerously mentioned name, that is, of Ibrãhīm(Abraham) (a.s.), who has been named sixty-nine times only — as some people have calculated.
It is not difficult to understand the reason for these frequent references. Islam, the true religion, is based on the belief of monotheism; its present foundation was laid by Ibrãhīm (a.s.); and Allãh completed and perfected it for His Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.a.), as He says: . . . the faith of your father Ibrãhīm; He named you Muslims before and in this . . . (22:78). And the Israelites were the most disputatious and most quarrelsome of all the nations; they were the most obstinate and most abstruse of all when there was a question of submitting to the truth. And the heathens of Arabia, whom the Prophet of Islam had to contend with, were of the same mould, so much so that Allãh said to His Prophet: Surely those who disbelieve alike is to them whether you warn them or do not warn them, they will not believe (2:6).
Every vice, every depravity found in the Israelites could be found in them(the pagan Arabs at the time of Prophet Muhammad); they, in their hard-heartedness and impertinence were the mirror-image of the Israelites.
Ponder over the stories of the Israelites, as narrated in the Qur’ãn; look at the picture of their characters and morals as it emerges from those narratives. You will find a nation deeply submerged in sensualism and materialism. They did not believe in what was beyond the reach of their external senses; for them spiritual happiness was a word without meaning; their only am-bition was the pursuit of sensual pleasure; their eyes could not focus on intellectual progress or spiritual perfection, so their only aim in life was the material development. And to this day, they have not changed a whit. It was this tendency which made their mind and will totally subservient to the matter and the material phenomena. They did not understand except that which they could see, hear, touch, taste or smell; they did not strive but for some tangible and material goals. Their servitude to the sensual phenomena prevented them from accepting any thing outside the domain of the five senses — even if it was truth; their thraldom to matter encouraged them to accept everything told by their materially advanced big bosses — even if it was false. It created a clear contrariety and inconsistency in their words and deeds. They condemned every adoption of others’ concepts, ridiculing it as blind following, if that concept was unperceivable by the external senses — no matter how correct it was. And at the same time, they appreciated every adoption of others’concepts, label-ling it as the pleasure of life, if it conformed with their material base desires — no matter how wrong that concept was. This trait became deeply rooted in their psyche during their long sojourn in Egypt, where the Egyptians humiliated them, enslaved them and castigated them; they subjected them to severe torment, killed their sons sparing their daughters, and in this was a great trial for them from their Lord.
However, it was this deep-rooted trait which made them heedless to what their prophets and divine scholars told them about what was good for them in this life as well as in the hereafter. (Remember their disputations with Mũsã and others!) And these very people were ever ready to accept and follow what their big bosses called them to, for gratification of their worldly desires.
Today the truth and reality has been afflicted by this very tragedy. The modern civilization, presented to the humanity by the western world, is likewise based on sensual perception and material outlook. It is not prepared to accept any proof for something which is not perceivable by the external senses; and does not ask for any proof of validity, if a thing gives material and sensual pleasure. This has resulted in weakening of the hold of human instincts, and in disappearance of deep knowledge and high morals from our society. This trait has exposed the edifice of humanity to ruin, and is confronting the society with chaos and disorder. And you will surely see its real face in a not too distant future.
Today the truth and reality has been afflicted by this very tragedy. The modern civilization, presented to the humanity by the western world, is likewise based on sensual perception and material outlook. It is not prepared to accept any proof for something which is not perceivable by the external senses; and does not ask for any proof of validity, if a thing gives material and sensual pleasure. This has resulted in weakening of the hold of human instincts, and in disappearance of deep knowledge and high morals from our society. This trait has exposed the edifice of humanity to ruin, and is confronting the society with chaos and disorder. And you will surely see its real face in a not too distant future.
Man, by his instinct, tries to find out the cause of every event, happening inside or outside his self. He does not do any action without knowing its reason; he does not accept any theory without ascertaining its proof. It is his unfailing trait; he always looks for the cause of the events and actions; it is his nature and the nature never deviates from its set course.
But this trait puts an unbearable burden on him. No individual can accomplish all the academic and practical processes required for his material and spiritual well-being. It is this burden which led the man to establish a society and cooperate with other human beings. Various people were given responsibilites to per-form various tasks, in order that the society, taken as a whole, might collectively accomplish all tasks, and fulfil all the needs of all its members put together.
Human needs are expanding by leaps and bounds; various branches of knowledge — sciences, technologies, arts etc. — are growing larger and larger, to such an extent that every subject has grown into hundreds of subjects — each requiring its own specialists. Look for example, at medical science. In old days it was a branch of physics; now it has branched out into hundreds of independent subjects, and no single physician or surgeon may gain expertise in more than one or two of them.
This vast multitude of special fields has instinctively led man to limit his inquiry for cause, and his search for proof, to only those branches of knowledge in which he has gained some expertise; and accept and follow the verdicts of other specialists in other fields. A sane person invariably always relies on the experts in the fields of their expertise. The confidence in their expertise creates a certainty that what has been said or done is correct; and this serves as the proof demanded by human nature.
The nature dictates that man should try his best to find out the detailed proof of the rightness of his idea and action in the fields of his speciality; and as a corollary it directs that he should unquestioningly accept the concepts and verdicts of others in other fields. In short, an ignorant man should follow the decree of a learned one. It is impossible for one man to be an expert in all the branches of knowledge, or independent in all the activities necessary for his life and well-being. Therefore, it is impossible for any man to be free from blindly following a lot of experts in numerous avenues of life. Anyone claiming contrary to this, is a fool.
Of course, it is a shame if a man remains content with un-questioning following, even where he can form an independentopinion based on detailed knowlege; as it is a shame if he forms independent opinion without acquiring necessary knowledge. Both trends are undesirable, both are ruinous to a healthy civilization, both are dangerous to the society.
It is the prerogative of Allãh that His decrees and orders be followed without any questioning, without any if or but; because He is the First and Final cause, an no other cause or reason is needed when He has spoken.

Sorry I mess up while pasting the excerpt from Tafsir Al Mizan. I pasted one of the paragraphs twice. The 2nd time you see the paragraph that starts with “Today the truth and reality has been afflicted by this very tragedy. The modern civilization, presented to the humanity by the western world…” You should read this paragraph below instead:

***
Actually, not every proof is asked for, nor every
unquestioning adoption of others’ ideas and concepts is
objectionable. Man proceeds on the road of perfection
through his intentional activities. His actions emanate from
his will, and the will springs from thought and notion.
Thinking, therefore, is the foundation of his perfection. Man
depends on practical or intellectual cognition to which his
perfection is directly or indirectly related. This cognition
creates in his mind the need for individual or collective
actions; this knowledge leads to intention and will which
produces the desired activity.

Why is it that most humans accept, as a defining conception and unique benefit for us alone, our seemingly endless capability to name things, give title to, and symbolize thoughts, however fantastic, through image and sound, when in truth such amazing talent actually degenerates from and trivializes our core identifying human essentials. Even the idea of a soul, or its more popular secular doppelganger, the person, are convergent in respect to this irascible program of self-immolation. Obviously, we all talk too much.

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